BI has emerged as a key driver for growth among business organizations. Numerous products and services have been rolled out by various vendors in the BI systems space. Each of these products fall into one of the following three categories: domain specific solutions, general purpose reporting tools and mathematical modeling products.
Domain specific solutions include the enterprise resource planning tools (ERP) from companies such as SAP® and Oracle®. These tools provide an out-of-the-box functionality for some key aspects of the business function and have certain well defined analytical models that help in making business decisions. The second class of products are commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) data warehousing/reporting tools. These tools can be connected to an enterprise system to extract and reorganize transactional information into star schema type of data models. Analysts and other decision makers can then query and analyze the information to do a trend analysis, find key bottlenecks to growth or predict future demands. These tools also provide online analytical processing (OLAP) capability. The third class of products is implementation of operations research methodologies, such as statistical analysis, mathematical optimization, and simulation. These tools can be used to build mathematical models and then feed the organizational information to get specific insights, such as statistical models can be built to predict the demand for certain key seasonal products or an optimization model to efficiently map the route for delivery trucks.
Each of the three classes of products comes up short of being tagged as a true BI system. Domain specific systems only provide a small subset of BI capabilities. Their main objective is to provide efficiencies in the operational systems. The off-the-shelf data warehousing tools provide the basic extract, transform & load (ETL) functionality. They enable users to quickly transform the transactional data to create drag-drop and drill down reporting capabilities. They provide descriptive information about the enterprise, but lack the capability to provide deep analytical capabilities. The products based on operations research are stand-alone tools and it is a cumbersome task to integrate them with the operational system in terms of both time and effort.
Hence, there remains a need for an agile framework that can overcome the deficiencies of each of the three classes of systems.